In Good Company
by Homeslice
Summary: Three different shinobi discarding their humanity in five different tales. [And then realigning with it.] SaixNarutoxHinata NarutoxSaixHinata, perhaps hints of NaruxSasu, NaruxSakura [if you really must]


1Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.

Summary: Three different shinobi discarding their humanity in five different tales. (And then realigning with it.)

Pairing(s): Sai/Naruto/Hinata - Naruto/Sai/Hinata

- - - -

.1

Hinata likes the feel of skin on skin and blades beneath her hands, even if Naruto's sentences are always clipped and nervous when she holds a kunai, and Sai's eyes are uneasy, like they both suspect her to cut herself. She only likes being a shinobi because there is false security, at least one better than being a civilian-, this way, she knows that if anyone ever attacked her, she could at least leave a scar on their body, to make them remember who she was and how strong she was.

Hinata knows her power level-, wants to ask 'do you know yours?' to Naruto and Sai.

- - - -

.2

The smile is crooked and lonely, and reminds her of a willow branch. Naruto has always had that perspective, that ability to make her bend and break because she was so brittle that under his fine, roughened touch she would snap-, he reminds her of his teacher, the great sannin Jiraiya who he has always tried to get her acquainted with but whom she shied away from, because she is deemingingly knowing of her place and knows that, also, this man is so far above her.

In that, so is Naruto, and so is Sai, and she realizes this more clearly than how it was when it began as Sai's eyes are black and huge beneath her, how Naruto is beginning to lose his crispness and fade into adulthood even by the simple start of crow's feet and wrinkles on his face. But Hinata knows that they both have ways in which they are lower than her-, this is where Naruto gives a laugh that has a fading to it's edges, and she knows that is where he is wrong, has always been wrong.

Hinata is stronger than Naruto because she cries.

Sai keeps a blank, even look, like the dull, flat side of a kunai. He has no bumps, no edges, and when she touches him her fingers glide along smooth. Hinata is stronger than Sai because she doesn't wash over herself with a hypothetical paint brush and if she does it is in her nature and not by pure will alone.

Hinata is stronger than both of them because she loves them, and says it to them, every night before they go to bed, every morning they wake up and join each other in the shower, every time Sai is up at her back and Naruto is pressed up against her breasts, cupping them in his rounded, calloused hands (this is where he is becoming more of his teacher-, his too-tan skin, his roughness, his vulgarity, his easy frown, his drink, his sores and warts and aches and the callouses that you feel all too clearly), every time one of them leaves for a mission-, and they do not.

In Hinata's world, everything comes down to saying 'I love you.', and smiling in the company of dust, skipping rocks over a dried up pond, wishing you were someone else who didn't have to deal with melancholy and knowing there is no one in the world that is like that.

- - - -

.3

Sai eats apples every day for breakfast. He does not give any explanation except for the continued ritual which, even unspoken, means it is what he is comfortable with, and therefore cannot be broken, doesn't need explanation.

Hinata thinks he probably eats them because Naruto eats ramen every day for breakfast, Sai likes apples, and he had wanted to find a schedule-obsession-ritual that could not be gone against facing fear of death or emotional strain like the blonde haired nin.

Sai also brushes his teeth at exactly seven o'clock when he is home, folds and washes laundry, arranges their silverware by alphabetical order ('fork, knife, spoon...'), and blinks in pairs of threes.

Hinata thinks maybe Sai has control issues, maybe he is obsessive compulsive, maybe he is simply as mad as them and the others and finds comfort (or whatever it is, whatever he gets from it that makes him continue) wherever he can-, she thinks he would make a very bad mother, and giggles at the thought, in the way she always giggles: into her hand, confidentially, as if every escaped sound is a part of a mission.

Sometimes Hinata thinks Sai wears the same expression because of the same reason, and that's why when it breaks, he looks as though he's punishing himself afterward, looks as though it's a horrible, terrible, dishonorable thing to do and Naruto and her have to put their hands all over him and distract him from being blank.

-

Naruto doesn't give an explanation for why he's still looking for Sasuke.

Sasuke is gone, and died three months ago, and took his brother with him, before him-, watched the proud look that should not have, in Sasuke's mind, been there, fade from his eyes, watched the gaze become milky and unclear and not focused on anything in particular, watched the lips loosen and unhinge like one's jaw did when they were so tired and couldn't keep it shut and couldn't keep their lids up at the same time. Hinata thinks, _he did that, he watched his brother die, unsatisfactorily, without complaint, with relief, even, and then he thought the world was going to end and couldn't stand for that. _

Sai one day asks her why they call it Sasuke dying if he killed himself-, it's the same thing but on a more personal level it's _not, _in an unexplainable way that makes her clench her fists by her sides and say 'He k_illed himself. _Suicide. _Suicide. _Sasuke didn't die, he killed himself, and that makes all the difference.'

It somehow made him more honorable. Hinata thought, if she killed herself, she would want people to say 'suicide' when asked the cause of death and she would want her gravestone to say 'killed herself, kunai to the head, bled for three minutes and twenty eight seconds alone, unwanted, dying inside and out, whatever way you want to take that', and she'd want to be able to roll over in her grave and laugh into the soil and feel the worms eating her inside out, purely out of satisfaction and not anything like what normal corpses would roll over in their grave for.

Hinata is comfortable in her grave-, she has been in one for the seventeen long years of her life.

Naruto slams his fist down on the table when Sai asks his question and their faces are comically white for a moment as he storms out the room, stumbles down the stairs of their little apartment that is too small for them, for their raging emotions and hormones and drama, like a baby growing out of it's shoes.

It's funny, she thinks, that Naruto turned out more like Kakashi-sensei than Sasuke-, now he sits in the grave yard and sees ghosts and talks to them, like there never was an Orochimaru, like there never was a betrayal, like there never was an Itachi or a massacre, like there never was a Sasuke.

He's talking to Sakura's ghost. She died healing Sasuke, and he hates every bit of him for it.

- - - -

.4

Naruto comes home stricken and nauseous and a crystalline white that matches the sink and the plates and Hinata's eyes. His hands are clenched by his sides and his back pressed up against the door-, so vulnerable that Hinata squanders around their kitchen and slowly watches the rice on the stove-top bubble over, at the time as listening to Naruto's breaths even out.

He keeps looking at his hands and after Hinata has made him sit down at the table he finally says, "I hit him.", even though the first time is a mumble and she has to ask for him to say it again.

(Naruto is acting uncannily like Hinata-, his stumbles and clutsy words and soft voice and clipped speech, and Hinata wants to hit _him _and yell and scream at him not to be her, because if she is not her than she has to be him and she doesn't want to have to feel what he does. The separation of person to person through skin and bone is sometimes cut short but now she is overwhelmingly grateful for it-, if she turned on the Byakugan, his chakra would be thick and fast like hyperventilation, and she likes breathing, likes the feel of not having to look at Sasuke as closely as Naruto examines him. It is, in fact, the same very thing.)

"Why?"

"'Dunno. He was being a jerk...You know." Hinata nods to this response because she knows exactly what to say.

"Sasuke-kun is always like that. Go apologize to him-, when you come back I'll have lunch ready."

Hinata _always_ knows exactly what to say. That is, sometimes, the only reason Naruto loves her.

-

Sai comes home to Naruto sobbing into her dress-skirt and remnants of lunch scattered messily over the table and floor, and immediately demands from Hinata an explanation. She merely shrugs and says, "Sasuke-kun was being a jerk, but they're over it now."

- - - -

.5

Later that night, folded in between the sheets, Naruto gives a long explanation. It is out of the blue and they are warm and happy and part of them wants to slam their hands over his mouth because his story, whatever he is going to tell them, is not going to be a good story and for once they want to sit and be healing, feel like they're making progress.

"I caught him trying to hang himself-, he had the noose pulled so tight I thought he'd choke to death before he even kicked the bench out from under him, but when I asked him later he said that wouldn't work at all and I was an idiot to think so. Your body naturally releases the rope when you pull it too tight-, did you know that? I told him to shut the hell up and I punched him and then I came home and told you, Hinata. And then I apologized like you said to." he says, almost all in one gasp of air so he is breathless when he pauses to look at them, having stared up at the ceiling the whole time. "Then he said it's okay and I think it is but also it's not. Anyway that doesn't matter, right? The glass is half full, too."

"No," Sai responds, "The glass is half empty. I can't cook and Hinata can't accept and you are absolutely hopeless at everything-, Sasuke will probably kill himself and you won't be there to punch him down from his suicidal perch. It'll have to end sometime, Naruto, but it's just not now."

Naruto grins because it's the closest they can get and by the time they are settled again-, arms wrapped around each other-, Hinata is able to put in her own words. "That was pointless, Sai-kun. We're momentary-, we're shinobi, so we've always known now is all we get. It's okay..."

"For now." Naruto finishes, and lights out their night with a laugh.

- - - -

_Well this house has a name and that name is 'Misery', but we learn to drink it up through our big sucking-straws and digest it and one day it'll be out of our systems. There are words beyond the name and they whisper so quietly I cannot hear them yet, but yet is yet as the smile on your face is just a smile-, I'll wipe it off with a whiteboard eraser and listen to the sound of the foundations laughing in glee, and we will laugh with it._

.6 (Author's Note):

This fic was something I feel like I screwed up the ending on. But I also kind of like it in an odd sense-, it ended happy, for the most part, and even though Sai's character was chinsed well whatever, because I liked how Naruto and Hinata's characters came out.

Will one day master the art of Sai-ism, but that day is not today. And you can all see that.

Most of this fic was actually wrote _without _music, oddly, so no lists. Also, prose at the end in italics just before this is...just prose. XD Uhh, nothing special. Just off the top of my head but I liked it and it came out and it feels STRANGELY SOUTHERN to me. XD

Seems those seven/eight years in Texas are finally catching up to me, wut?

Obviously this oneshot was about healing. -heart- Sai definitely has a big crush on Naruto-san, and we know that, in canon, Hinata does...so I smooshed them together. It reminds me of Naruto/Sakura/Sasuke (in whatever order, accordingly), actually. Threesomes, threesomes.

**Feedback is mucho appreciated.**


End file.
